Legislation that would require employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of new hires came under fire Tuesday from state lawmakers and legal authorities who said it would hurt businesses while driving jobs and undocumented workers underground.

Lamar Smith has proposed legislation that would mandate the use of E-Verify, a citizenship verification database, for businesses within six months to three years. (Official photo)

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is the lead sponsor for the bill that would require employers to use the E-Verify system, which verifies new employee’s citizenship status by checking names and Social Security numbers against databases maintained by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

If Smith’s legislation became law, large companies would begin using the system to verify applicants’ status within six months and other employers would phase into the mandate over the next three years. The bill would fine employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers.

Smith has said the legislation will create jobs for Americans by preventing undocumented workers from taking jobs.

But Curt Bramble, a Republican state senator from Utah, joined Mark Shurtleff, the Republican Attorney General of Utah, in saying the proposal falls short of workable reform at a National Press Club conference panel sponsored by two business-oriented non-profit organizations, ImmigrationWorks USA and the New America Foundation.

Bramble said the U.S. economy demands cheap labor and that employers will continue to hire undocumented workers despite E-Verify.

He said the stiff penalties Smith’s legislation mandates – it grows fines for knowingly hiring an undocumented worker from $250 to $2,000 for a first offense to $2,500 to $5,000 while raising the maximum fine from $10,000 to $25,000 per employee – will simply force businesses to hire under the table and away from government regulation.
“We may as well legislate to stop the rising tide,” he said.

Bramble said because of the “abject, pathetic, dismal failure of the federal government” to take on immigration, Utah has tried to address the problem at a state level.

Utah state senator Curt Bramble. (AP photo)

Both Bramble and Shurtleff supported a bill the Utah legislature passed in March that, like a milder version of Arizona’s controversial 2010 law, requires law enforcement officers to ascertain the citizenship status of any person they detain or arrest for a felony or misdemeanor.

Unlike the Arizona or federal laws, Utah’s immigration package creates a guest worker program that would allow unauthorized immigrants who lived in the state prior to May 11, 2011, to pay a $2,500 fine and pass a background check to stay and work legally. It would require a $1,000 fine of those who overstayed a visa.

“If you’re going to mandate and punish, you need some way to fill those positions legally,” Shurtleff said.

Utah’s law, HB116, won’t take effect until July 2013 and would require federal government approval – which could be problematic, since a District Court already blocked the measure pending its constitutionality in an American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center suit this May.